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Andre Gorz's Life-Enhancing Vision of an Alternative Society

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Andre Gorz's Life-Enhancing Vision of an Alternative Society André Gorz Reclaiming Work Beyond the Wage-Based Society Translated by Chris Turner 'After twenty years of pessimism and social resignation to neo-liberal policies, it is refreshing to read Andre Gorz's life-enhancing vision of an alternative society. He stimulates our imaginative faculties and challenges us to join him in the construction of feasible socio-economic policies. His capacity to see beyond the negativity of the present places him firmly in the grand tradition of utopian thought.' Boris Frankel, author of The Post Industrial Utopians 'In this brilliant, challenging and well-written book, Andre Gorz provides us with an incisive analysis of the crisis confronting globalizing post-industrial societies in a world of jobless growth and social disintegration. He offers practical proposals to overcome this crisis as well as an attractive alternative political ecological vision of how economic and social life can be brought back under democratic control.' Bob Jessop, Lancaster University 'Andre Gorz is a key contributor to debates about the future of work. This book shows how technological progress can be reconciled with economic security and social equity. A new social order beckons – a "culture-based" society, in which the economy is servant rather than master. Have we the imagination and courage to grasp Gorz's challenge?' Frank Stilwell, The University of Sydney Over the last twenty-five years, Western societies have been reversing into the future, able neither to reproduce themselves in accordance with past norms nor to exploit the unprecedented freedom offered by the savings in working time that new technology has generated. In this major new book, Andre Gorz argues that Fordist societies have given way to 'non-societies', in which a tiny dominant stratum has grabbed most of the surplus wealth. He claims that we are in the grip of a new system which is abolishing work as we know it and restoring the worst forms of exploitation. But he argues that we should fight not against the destruction of work itself, but against efforts to perpetuate the ideology of work as a source of rights. Andre Gorz is a leading social and political thinker and author of many books, including Critique of Economic Reason, Farewell to the Working Class and Paths to Paradise. Reclaiming Work For Dorine again, again and evermore Reclaiming Work Beyond the Wage-Based Society ANDRE GORZ Translated by Chris Turner EDUSKUNNAN KIRJASTO Polity Press Copyright © this translation Polity Press 1999. First published in French as Misères du present: richesse du possible © Editions Galilee 1997. First published in 1999 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture – Centre National du Livre. Editorial office: Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1 UR, UK Marketing and production: Blackwell Publishers Ltd 108 Cowley Road Oxford OX4 1JF, UK Published in the USA by Blackwell Publishers Inc. Commerce Place 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. ISBN 0-7456-2127-9 ISBN 0-7456-2128-7 (pbk) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and has been applied for from the Library of Congress. Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Berling by Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books, Bodmin, Cornwall This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents Introduction 1 1 From the Social State to the Capital State 9 The Great Refusal 9 The 'Exodus' of Capital 11 The End of Economic Nationalism 14 Blame it on Globalization' 16 The Resistible Dictatorship of the Financial Markets 19 The Chinese Mirage 22 2 The Latest Forms of Work 27 Post-Fordism 27 Uddevall a 32 Subjection 36 Autonomy and the Sale of Self 39 Work which is Abolishing Work 44 Metamorphoses of Wage Labour 46 Generalized Insecurity 52 3 The Lost Magic of Work 55 The Myth of the Social Bond 55 Generation X or the Unheard Revolution 59 Politics Lags Behind the Shift in Values 64 Socialization or Education? 67 vi Contents 4 Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society 72 Multi-Activity as a Key Social Issue 72 Exit Routes 78 Guaranteed income 80 Redistribution of work, liberation of free time 93 Changing the city 100 Epilogue 112 Digression 1 Community and Society 117 Digression 2 Main Touraine or the Subject of Criticism 127 Notes 148 Index 169 Introduction We have to learn to discern the unrealized opportunities which lie dormant in the recesses of the present. We must want to seize these opportunities, to take possession of the changes that are occurring. We must be bold enough to choose the Exodus. There is nothing to be gained from symptomatic treatments of the 'crisis', for there no longer is any crisis. A new system has been established which is abolishing 'work' on a massive scale. It is restoring the worst forms of domination, subjugation and exploitation by forcing each to fight against all in order to obtain the 'work' it is abolishing. It is not this abolition we should object to, but its claiming to perpetuate that same work, the norms, dignity and availability of which it is abol- ishing, as an obligation, as a norm, and as the irreplaceable founda- tion of the rights and dignity of all. We must dare to prepare ourselves for the Exodus from 'work- based society': it no longer exists and will not return. We must want this society, which is in its death-throes, to die, so that another may arise from its ruins. We must learn to make out the contours of that other society beneath the resistances, dysfunctions and impasses which make up the present. 'Work' must lose its centrality in the minds, thoughts and imaginations of everyone. We must learn to see it differently: no longer as something we have – or do not have – but as what we do. We must be bold enough to regain control of the work we do. 2 Introduction The polemics stirred up by Jeremy Rifkin's book, The End of Work, are significant here.' What he calls the 'end of work' is the end of what everyone has become accustomed to call 'work'. It is not work in the anthropological or philosophical sense of the term. It is not the labour of the parturient woman, nor the work of the sculptor or poet. It is not work as the 'autonomous activity of transforming matter', nor as the 'practico-sensory activity' by which the subject exteriorizes him/herself by producing an object which bears his/her imprint. It is, unambiguously, the specific 'work' peculiar to indus- trial capitalism: the work we are referring to when we say 'she doesn't work' of a woman who devotes her time to bringing up her own children, but 'she works' of one who gives even some small part of her time to bringing up other people's children in a playgroup or a nursery school. The 'work' one does in this sense (though it is more a 'having' than a 'doing': we speak of 'having a job') may have none of the char- acteristics of work in the anthropological or philosophical sense. Today, in fact, it is most often bereft of what defined work for Hegel: it is not the exteriorization (Entäusserung) by which subjects achieve self-realization by inscribing themselves upon the objective materi- ality of what they create or produce. The millions of clerical or tech- nical workers 'working' on VDUs are not realizing anything tangible. Their practico-sensory activity is reduced to the barest minimum, their bodies and sensibilities bracketed out of the operation. Their 'work' is in no sense an 'appropriative shaping of the objective world', even though it may have such a shaping as a very distant and mediate effect. For the 'workers' in the 'intangible' sphere, and for a majority of service providers, the 'products' of their labour are evanescent, consumed at the same time as they are produced. Seldom can these 'workers' say: 'Here's what I've done. This is the piece of work I've made. This was my doing.' I hate the fraudsters who, in the name of the philosophical or anthropological definition of work, justify the value of a form of 'work' which is the very negation of that definition. Efforts to deny 'the end of work' in the name of the necessity and permanence of work in the anthropological or philosophical sense demonstrate the opposite of what they were attempting to prove: it is precisely in the sense of self-realization, in the sense of poiesis' , of the creation of a work as oeuvre, that work is disappearing fastest into the virtualized realities of the intangible economy. If we wish Introduction 3 to rescue and sustain this 'real work', it is urgent that we recognize that real work is no longer what we do when 'at work': the work, in the sense of poiesis, which one does is no longer (or is increasingly rarely) done 'at work'; it no longer corresponds to the 'work' which, in the social sense of the term, one 'has'.
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